Sweepstakes marketing, PPC marketing and SEO all have their own place in the marketing world. If you’re looking to cast a wide net for an affordable price (depending on your prizes), get a lot of eyeballs, grow your social profiles, and grow your email list, then running a sweepstakes is ideal. Giancarlo Massaro, cofounder of ViralSweep writes how the platform can help you build a better customer engagement through attractive incentives in form of sweepstakes!

Businesses can enhance their brand value through sweepstakes in a variety of different ways:
- Build an email list through a giveaway
- Remarket to people who entered the giveaway but didn’t win
- Hosting a giveaway allows people to learn about the company
- Giveaways tend to have a viral aspect which helps increase brand exposure

If you want to focus on targeting specific customers, getting conversions and trying to get a return on every click, then PPC has its place. If you want to get organic traffic and rank high in Google, then SEO is something you would want to focus on. I think they all are important, and all should be a part of a company’s marketing strategy.

We started building ViralSweep in February of 2012. We began closed beta testing in August 2012, did a soft launch in early December 2012, and have officially launched in open beta this past February.

ViralSweep help brands to engage with customers more efficiently

We help brands engage with customers more efficiently by allowing them to build, run, and manage giveaways right on their own website. This is effective because it allows you to engage customers right on your own site, instead of on a 3rd party site like Facebook or Twitter.

Setting up ViralSweep on a website or blog is very simple. You use our DIY giveaway tool to setup your giveaway, and then we provide you with a snippet of code that you paste onto a blank HTML file and upload to your site. This allows you to place to giveaway on any page of your site, for example www.yourwebsite.com/giveaway

“Anatomy of a doomsday marketing campaign built in 7 hours”

My co-founder and I came up with a unique angle to soft launch ViralSweep back in December. The “Mayan Doomsday” was fast approaching (December 21, 2012) and we thought, “why not run a giveaway using ViralSweep offering up a doomsday survival kit?”

We built the landing page Doomsdaygiveaway in about 7 hours and had our giveaway up and running. The promotion ended up collecting well over 5,000 entries in 24 hours; pretty good for a “brand” with no customers or fans to promote to out of the gate.

The art of running a sweepstakes on ViralSweep is a different take on customer engagement

Hunting for PR is a cat and mouse game and can be very tough. Also, PR also isn’t always what it’s worked up to be, and can have very little effect on growing your business if it is not targeted towards the right audience.

Running a sweepstakes is a great way to help you focus on establishing and growing an audience. It also is a great way to draw in people that may know about your brand, but you don’t have a way to reach out to them. With a sweepstakes, you can capture their email and remarket to them.

One of our clients was spending in excess of $1,000 per month on Adwords. For every $100 spent, they were seeing between 60-70 clicks. Their PPC ROI wasn’t turning out to be a good short term investment, and they were constantly looking for new channels to distribute their brand in a way that was measurable and scalable. They decided to run a sweepstakes on their website using ViralSweep and in 1 month received 5,235 email entries, 700 shares on Facebook, 659 new likes on their Facebook page, and 594 tweets about their giveaway, all for under $100.

Working for PR, when you can get it, is great for telling your story. Sweepstakes are great at getting your product into the hands of the people who want it most and gaining access to a group of people who have proven their interest by entering the sweepstakes.

Getting ViralSweep to work for you!

Any type of business can benefit from using ViralSweep. If you have a product or service that people want, and you want to grow your email list and attract potential leads, running a giveaway is a good place to start because the cost is usually very minimal.

We offer a free 14 day trial with no credit card required, so anyone, including startups low on funds, can run their first giveaway for 14 days for free.

Watch our video

All things new on ViralSweep

We have a bunch of great features that we will be implementing in the coming months. Just recently we added incentivized sharing, which allows people to receive additional entries into the giveaway for performing social actions like tweeting, sharing, and liking on Facebook. We also added in referrals, which allows for people to receive additional entries by getting their friends to enter through their referral link.

We will soon be releasing mobile optimized giveaways so they will be super easy to enter and access from your mobile browser, and we’ll have Facebook integration coming shortly after.